Toronto Networking Seminar

Organized by Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

David Yau

   Purdue University

            Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Singapore

November 2, 11am

 Room: BA 1210

Abstract

Mobility traces of people and vehicles have been published to assist the design of mobile networks. Although the traces are often made anonymous by replacing the true identities of nodes by random identifiers, the privacy concern remains. This is because in real life, nodes are open to observations or they may disclose partial knowledge about their whereabouts. Thus third parties can learn snapshots of nodes' location information. In this talk, I will show how an adversary, when armed with a small amount of the snapshot side information, can infer an extended view of the whereabouts of a victim node appearing in an anonymous trace. I will quantify the loss of privacy as a function of factors such as nodal mobility, the inference strategies of adversaries, and any noise that may appear in the trace or the side information.

Bio

David Yau obtained the B.Sc. (first class honors) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, all in computer science. Since 1997, he has been on the faculty of Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, where he is now Associate Professor of Computer Science. He is currently on leave as Distinguished Scientist at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore. David received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He served as associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2004--09),  TPC co-chair (2010) of Int'l Conf. Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN), vice general chair (2006) and TPC co-chair (2007) of IEEE Int'l Conf. on Network Protocols (ICNP), and TPC co-chair (2006) and Steering Committee member (2007--2009) of IEEE Int'l Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS). His research interests are in protocol design and implementation, network security, and wireless/sensor networks.